Gear Gossip

How we pick products

We cover products people are already asking about: searches like "[product] reddit", "[product] problems", "is [product] worth it" and "[A] vs [B]". A product needs at least 50 findable owner mentions before we score it, so we don't publish verdicts on thin evidence.

Which sources count

  • Counted, full weight: verified-purchase retailer reviews, owner posts on Reddit and enthusiast forums.
  • Counted, extra weight: owners describing six or more months of use.
  • Counted, half weight: reviews hosted on the brand's own site.
  • Kept separate: expert reviews. They feed the Hype Gap, not the Gossip Score.
  • Excluded: incentivized reviews, free-product reviews and anything that looks fake.

We read individual public pages. We don't bulk-scrape sites, buy review datasets, or copy Amazon review text, star ratings or images.

How we quote

Every quote on Gear Gossip is a short excerpt of a public post, a sentence or less, and links to where it was said. We blur or omit usernames in videos. Negative points are always attributed: "owners say the poles snap", never "the poles snap".

How we use AI

We use AI tools to sort and tag mentions and to draft pages. A person checks every page before it goes live: the score against the scoring output, and every quote against its source link. A page can only quote text that exists in our mentions records.

Independence

Brands can't pay for a score, a badge or a ranking. Affiliate commissions never change a score. If a brand ever buys research from us, it never touches public scores, and we'll say so.

Updates and corrections

We re-check our most-read pages every month and show the last refreshed date on every score. Spot something wrong? See Corrections.